Pico, a VIRTUAL reality (VR) startup, has been acquired by ByteDance, the company has revealed. Catalyzed by this event, a new term, “metaverse”, which many people did not recognize, entered the public’s view.
While we’re still trying to understand this new concept, some of the biggest tech companies have already begun to explore the realm of the metaverse.
As early as the end of 2020, Pony Ma proposed a “real Internet to help users achieve a more real experience”, which is very similar to the metaverse concept. Not long ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees that Facebook would transform itself from a social media company into a metaverse company in the next few years. Also, this year, Microsoft came up with a solution to create an “enterprise metaverse.”
What exactly is a “metaverse”? How might it affect our lives? We take you to find out!
What is the “metaverse”?
Metaverse is a concept that first appeared in American writer Neil Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Avalanche.
The novel depicts a virtual digital world that is parallel to the real world, called the metaverse. People in the real world have a virtual counterpart in the “meta world”, and they compete to improve their status by controlling this virtual doppelganger.
Ready Player One, the 2018 sci-fi film directed by Steven Spielberg, is considered the most consistent form of the metaverse described in Avalanche. In the movie, the hero wears a VR headset and instantly enters Oasis, another extremely realistic virtual game world he designed.
In the “oasis” scene set by Ready Player One, people connect their consciousness with a parallel virtual world through helmet equipment, and control their “virtual avatar” to carry out a series of social activities in a fully functioning virtual society set by “Oasis”.Pony Ma
https://youtu.be/UvKYNz6D4KQ
Why did the metaverse suddenly become popular?
The metaverse concept has been around for a long time in science fiction, so what made it so popular this year? This should be understood from three aspects:
First, from the perspective of demand, COVID-19 has eroded and weakened people’s physical connections while accelerating the digital world’s improvement. The more time people spend in virtual space and interacting with each other, the more demand they have for virtual worlds.
Second, from the perspective of technological development, with the development of VR, AR, 5G, AI, and other technologies, scenes that once only appeared in science fiction and movies have become a reality one by one. This is the initial form of the metaverse and provides a visible and tangible sample for the metaverse.
For example, in 2020, the University of California at Berkeley could not hold its graduation ceremony on-site due to the epidemic. Therefore, the school decided to build a virtual campus in the virtual world of the game “Minecraft”, which is highly consistent with the real campus. Students came to the virtual campus as “virtual Avatars” to attend the graduation ceremony through related equipment.
Third, from an economic point of view, the big guys must have seen the future of business when they did the metaverse for real. As it stands now, games are a prototype of the metaverse. Still, the greater freedom and user engagement that the metaverse brings to content creation means those game manufacturers may have the opportunity to break new ground in the game industry. As the technology matures, the next stage of metaverse development is to reconstruct the social and consumption aspects in reality in the digital world. Under the current situation that a bottleneck has hit the bonus space of the Internet industry, the metaverse seems to provide a new round of growth opportunities and upgrading outlets.
How far are we from the metaverse?
How will the metaverse affect our lives? Since there is no simple and concrete definition of the metaverse, each Internet company has to understand and shape its own metaverse in its own way.
At present, this concept is fully used in the field of online games.
Friends familiar with online games know that the essence of some online games is to build a virtual environment, and every user can find their own existence in that world. Roblox, a US gaming company, known as the “first in the metaverse, ” built an immersive 3D online game creation platform.
The metaverse starts with the game, but it doesn’t end there.
Just in 2020, more than 12 million players participated in an immersive virtual concert on the game Fortnite. Concert singers perform the latest single, with stunning game scene effects, to bring participants a different immersive experience.
In addition to entertainment, serious academic conferences are also involved in the metaverse. In 2020, the top academic conference, ACAI (International Conference on Algorithms, Computing, and Artificial Intelligence), chose Nintendo’s Animal Crossing for its workshop, with speakers playing PowerPoint and speaking in-game.
Despite the tech tycoons’ attention and the intriguing examples, it’s worth acknowledging that the construction of the metaverse is still in its infancy.
The mature application of an important technological achievement is inseparable from the advanced layout of many infrastructures. Like the end of last century, the construction of information highway paving the way for the Internet technology maturity, yuan the perfection of the universe also needs many long-term construction technologies.
Specifically, it roughly includes the following three parts: First, the highly developed global Internet. Then there is the hardware level of AR and VR. The last is the development of next-generation information and communication technologies such as 5G and graphics technologies.
At present, these technologies are not yet of the scale or quality to build a meta-cosmic ecology.
What will the future be like? Let’s see!
Reference link:
- http://news.cn/sikepro/20210909/363f6dcc86bc4864b3deb5bab92e7903/c.html
- https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/what-is-the-metaverse-and-why-is-everyone-talking-about-it/articleshow/86173493.cms
